I see a lot of reuse is good so it's all good. Do we know if the buyers of these reused shoes will recycle then when done or are these ending in a landfill? Because that's the ultimate issue here. Dow promised their end was not landfill.
It's technically correct that we need some animal products. The big one I can think of is crude oil. It's from animals long dead and also used to make plastics. Not sure if we count insects as animal products but the work of bees helps pollinate our crops. We don't eat the bees but we do take advantage of them and breed them to go around and pollinate crops.
This seems like a big flaw of crypto. Banks don't have their customers actual money. Crypto does. All that money in one place, under the control of a few, so tempting.
You don't need a CS diploma but you need to know how to program. You'll get either a take home project or white board problems during the interview. If you can pass those, you aren't lazy, and you aren't a jerk you are hired.